GOODLING

= GOODLING'S WIKI-WIKI-BLOG-BLOG =

=Portfolio 3 Final Draft=

A Writer’s Memo  I found this to be yet another challenging paper to write. I have never written a research paper in which I chose the thesis before, and that is the part which I struggled the most with. I kept worrying about writing further, because I actually did not develop a clear cut thesis until my second or third draft. Once again, I have learned that had I just not worried about what my thesis was, that simply writing in the direction I was going in would have eventually have yielded my actual thesis. It was very interesting how my final thesis came to be. My initial idea during the brainstorming session that our class had in the library was to simply relate economic theory to //Brave New World//. I did a bit more thinking and knew that I somehow wanted to write about something that dealt with consumerism and //Brave New World//, and also relate it to our society today. A bit of researching in the library about consumerism in conjunction with reading //Brave New World Revisited// yielded that I wanted to narrow my focus further to relate the consumerism of children in our society, specifically relating hypnopaedia in the World State to the singing commercials that are targeted towards children in our society. Once I got onto that track, my paper really began to write itself, so to speak. All-in-all I felt that this was most certainly the most changeling portfolio of the three, and it is certainly fitting that it is our final assignment. Thank you very much for a very metacognitively enlightening, enjoyable semester. Enjoy the holiday season!!

A Hypnopaedic Youth  In Aldous Huxley’s prophetic //Brave New World,// the reader is immersed in a society, the World State, in which the citizens are viewed not as people, but as consumers. The World State is a society in which the goal of humans is not to find love and reproduce (as natural birth is strictly forbidden) but to consume goods in order to maintain economic stability. While the book may seem a bit far fetched in certain regards, our society is equating existence with consumption more and more. Susan Strasser claims in //Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century//, that “During the Great Depression and New Deal consumption, citizenship, and democracy came to light in an urgent way.” Strasser claims that as a result of the New Deal, “...American people fitfully but firmly came to equate the consumer with the citizen a consumer standard of living with democracy, and the full participation in such an economy of spending and accumulation with being an American” (Strasser, 37).  This is exactly parallel with how citizens in the World State consider consumption to be an integral part of being a member of society, and thus an integral part of political and economic stability. In chapter three of //Brave New World,// the director is quoted as saying, "strange to think that even in Our Ford's day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It's madness. Nowadays the Controllers won't approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games" (Huxley, 37). This can be seen as analogous to our society today, with the stimulus package: the goal of which is to spark consumption among Americans. Spending, not saving. “Ending is better than Mending.”(Huxley, 55) We live in a consumerist society where it is seen as better and, often times, cheaper to throw something away rather than to fix it.

 Huxley states his belief that in our society, unknowing, helpless children are being brainwashed by advertisers into consumers in //Brave New World Revisited.// He states that “Today, thanks to radio and television, [the propagandist] is in the happy position of being able to communicate even with unschooled adults and not yet literate children. Children, as might be expected, are highly susceptible to propaganda. They are ignorant of the world and its ways, and therefore completely unsuspecting. ...Their little brothers and sisters have now become radio fodder and television fodder. in  my childhood we were taught to sing nursery rhymes and, in pious households, hymns. Today the little ones warble the Singing Commercials.”(Huxley, 283). It seems that this trend has continued into our current times. (any contemporary examples come to mind? "just do it", "did anybody say McDonald's?", "oh, thank heaven for 7-11")

 Today, more than ever, advertising is in your face. It is fed to us via radio, television, professional sports, billboards, on cars, and on the internet. Most disturbing is the fact that children are being molded into consumers at a younger and younger age. Before television and radio, advertisements were only written, and thus marketing could only be targeted to, at youngest, literate children. However, with the invention of television and radio, children only need to have a basic grasp of language for the marketing to be instilled, almost brainwashed into them. Huxley quotes a star of a television show aimed towards children on page 284 of //Brave New World Revisited// as stating, “Children...are living, talking records of what we tell them every day.” Huxley adds to this by stating, “And in due course these living, talking records of television commercials will grow up, earn money and buy the products of industry” (Huxley, 284). Anecdotally this writer’s mother told him but a few years back, that when he was only two years old, she took him to the supermarket. She went to pick up Tide detergent, and he said with delight, “Don’t buy that one mom. “Don’t risk it, Wisk it!”” Even at two years old the brainwashing had set in.  The problem seems to be worsening as children are now being thrown in front of the television set at a younger age, with the invention of children’s programming and so called “learning” television shows. Children are repeating slogans that bear a semblance to “Ending is better than mending; The more stitches the less riches; One cubic centimeter cures ten gloomy sentiments; a gramme is better than a damn” ( Huxley, 55,60,61). Huxley reasserts his beliefs that consumers are being brainwashed through musical advertisements on page 283 of //Brave New World Revisited//, “For the commercial propagandist, as for his colleagues in the fields of politics and religion, music possesses yet another advantage. Nonsense which it would be shameful for a reasonable being to write, speak or hear spoken can be sung or listened to by that same rational being with pleasure and even with a kind of intellectual conviction” (Huxley, 283). Huxley is postulating that advertising transcends logic and rationality, much in the way he claims hypnopaedia to in //Brave New World//.

Hypnopaedia, in context to //Brave New World,// is sleep-teaching--a type of brainwashing in which moral lessons are played over and over again to all of the children of the World State while they sleep. On page 33 of //Brave New World//, the director explains how hypnopaedia cannot be “made an instrument of intellectual education...” The director further explains that hypnopaedia cannot be used to “teach” critical thinking and analysis. It can only be used to program individuals to be able to recite phrases, without knowing the intent or rationale behind them. For this reason, the director states that hypnopaedia is a perfect vehicle for moral education, which in his words, “...ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational” (Huxley, 34) This type of moral education yields individuals with moral beliefs which they will never question. Since the moral standard is set by the World State, hypnopaedia ensures the power and stability of the World State by allowing it to program its citizens to accept all information that the World State feeds them, and reject or question none of it.

 But can the use of song in advertisements, particularly advertisements aimed towards children, be viewed as a type of brainwashing? The power of song is not to be overlooked. Song is most certainly a wonderful vehicle of learning. As a matter of fact, it generally is the very first way in which children are formally taught in school. Children are not simply told to memorize their ABC’s, but are taught a song which facilitates the memorization. Everyone remembers singing, “Now I know my A-B-C’s! Next time won’t you sing with me?” as a child. The common use of the phrase “having a bad song stuck in one’s head,” suggests somewhat more that a catchy song can become “stuck”, or somewhat brainwashed into one’s head. It seems almost horrifying to realize that our society allows advertisers to almost force children into consumerism. Are children even given a choice as to whether or not to be materialistic consumers?  Are we //really// being conditioned to buy, buy, buy as impressionable youths? James McNeal’s book, //Kids as Customers// certainly suggests that we are. The subheading of the book on the title page is the following, “A Handbook of Marketing to Children.” <span style="color: #ff00ff; font: 12px/19px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;">(why mention the subtitle without commenting on its significance? you've found an excellent source in an 'insider's handbook') <span style="font: 12px/19px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;"> The book states that in the year of its publication (1992), roughly $1,003,500,000.00 was spent on advertising campaigns aimed at children. (p133). McNeal’s model of the effects advertising has on children “suggests that an ad campaign (rarely one ad) produces attitudes and behaviors among an audience of children. The attitudes are toward the product, the brand, its producer, seller, even the advertisement and advertising in general.” He explains that **this behavior that advertising produces in children is manifested in three ways:** children seeking out and buying the product; attempting to get their parents to either buy it for them or give them money to buy it; and peers pressuring the child into thinking he //needs// the product. (146). Huxley certainly views conditioning of this sort as a type of enslavement. Evidence of this can be seen by combing his insights from //Brave New World Revisited// mentioned above along with Bernard’s quote on page 90 of //Brave New World//, “-what would it be like if I could, if I were free--not enslaved by my conditioning.”

<span style="font: 12px/19px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;"> The next question is: is this ethical? It all seems terrifyingly evil that our children are being enslaved into consumerism, all to benefit the profit margins of firms. But is this really a bad thing? Huxley provides us with a possible society should all of this advertising “brainwashing” be taken to an extreme. But let’s take a look at the other end of the spectrum. Suppose that children were not enslaved into consumerism, but rather conditioned to be frugal. Simple macroeconomic theory teaches us that saving, while seemingly good for the individual, is actually very detrimental to society as a whole. With citizens saving their money, and fixing their old and broken goods, firms would produce less of these goods. Less production obviously means the firms would need less labor. The result would be unemployment. While this would be all good and fine in a society of subsistence farmers, it would lead to catastrophe in a society such as ours. Unemployment would soar, and more and more families would be forced to go without food, shelter, and other necessities (Kish-Goodling). The families in this new, hypothetical, shall we call it “New Brave New World” would also be enslaved, enslaved to poverty and all of its atrocities. **Perhaps we are enslaved into being consumers. But it is our consumerist tendencies that enables technological advance, and ultimately the betterment of society.**

<span style="display: block; font: 12px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-align: center; text-indent: -36px;">Works Cited

<span style="font: 12px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px;">Huxley, Aldous. //Brave New World//. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006. Print.

<span style="font: 12px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px;">Huxley, Aldous. //Brave New World Revisited//. New York: HarperPerennial, 2006. Print.

<span style="font: 12px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px;">Kish-Goodling, Donna Marie. M.B.A., Ph.D. Economics. "Economic Theory Interview." Personal interview. 28 Nov. 2010.

<span style="font: 12px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px;">McNeal, James U. "Advertising to Children." //Kids as Customers: a Handbook of Marketing to Children//. New York: Lexington, 1992. 130-53. Print.

<span style="font: 12px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px;">Strasser, Susan, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt. "Consumption and Citizenship in the United State, 1900-1940." //Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century//. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1998. 37-58. Print.

<span style="display: block; font: 12px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-align: center; text-indent: -36px;">Works Consulted

<span style="font: 12px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px;">Aaker, David A., and George S. Day. //Consumerism: Search for the Consumer Interest.// New York: Free, 1974. Print.

<span style="font: 12px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px;">Huxley, Aldous. //Brave New World//. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006. Print.

<span style="font: 12px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px;">Huxley, Aldous. //Brave New World Revisited//. New York: HarperPerennial, 2006. Print.

<span style="font: 12px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px;">Kish-Goodling, Donna Marie. M.B.A., Ph.D. Economics. "Economic Theory Interview." Personal interview. 28 Nov. 2010.

<span style="font: 12px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px;">Latham, Rob. //Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption//. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2002. Print.

<span style="font: 12px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px;">McNeal, James U. "Advertising to Children." //Kids as Customers: a Handbook of Marketing to Children//. New York: Lexington, 1992. 130-53. Print.

<span style="font: 12px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px;">McNeal, James U. //The Kids Market: Myths and Realities//. Ithaca, NY: Paramount Market, 1999. Print.

<span style="font: 12px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px;">Strasser, Susan, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt. "Consumption and Citizenship in the United State, 1900-1940." //Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century//. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1998. 37-58. Print.

There once was a Lad named Tim Who was not informed how to Swim He fell off a Dock And sunk like a Rock And that was the End of Him!



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Comparing John and Bernard:
Ch. 7) //"I ought to have been there," the young man went on. "Why wouldn't they let me be the sacrifice? I'd have gone round ten times–twelve, fifteen. Palowhtiwa only got as far as seven. They could have had twice as much blood from me. The multitudinous seas incarnadine." He flung out his arms in a lavish gesture; then, despairingly, let them fall again. "But they wouldn't let me. They disliked me for my complexion. It's always been like that. Always." Tears stood in the young man's eyes; he was ashamed and turned away.//

-I find this interesting. Bernard and John are somewhat parallel characters in the novel, both are outcasts in their societies for different reasons. John is an outcast and yearns to be accepted by society, where Bernard is becoming an outcast and prides himself on being an outcast, proud of his individuality. I find a similar trait in each of them though. Bernard feels somewhat superior for being and individual in the World State, and John feels superior to the other savages because he knows how to read. Illustrated in the following passage:

Ch. 8) //The boys still sang their horrible song about Linda. Sometimes, too, they laughed at him for being so ragged. When he tore his clothes, Linda did not know how to mend them. In the Other Place, she told him, people threw away clothes with holes in them and got new ones. "Rags, rags!" the boys used to shout at him. "But I can read," he said to himself, "and they can't. They don't even know what reading is."//

The Word State: A State of Infants
-I found the passages where Linda is trying to teach John certain things extremely interesting. If it wasn't something that was part of her casts learnings, or should I say brainwashings, she has no idea how to explain it. A prime example is :

Ch. 8) //"What are chemicals?" he would ask.//

//"Oh, stuff like magnesium salts, and alcohol for keeping the Deltas and Epsilons small and backward, and calcium carbonate for bones, and all that sort of thing."//

//"But how do you make chemicals, Linda? Where do they come from?"//

//"Well, I don't know. You get them out of bottles. And when the bottles are empty, you send up to the Chemical Store for more. It's the Chemical Store people who make them, I suppose. Or else they send to the factory for them. I don't know. I never did any chemistry. My job was always with the embryos. It was the same with everything else he asked about. Linda never seemed to know. The old men of the pueblo had much more definite answers.//

Mescal vs. Mescaline
In chapter eight there is mention of a drink the savages drink, that Linda seems to be addicted to called mescal. This reminded me of mescaline, so I did a bit of wikipedia searching, and this is what I found, check it out here.

Looks like there are some parallels, and also it looks like originally mescaline was used by Native American tribes and it was extracted from the juice of certain cacti. It is a very powerful hallucinogen. I definitely think this is the drug Huxley is alluding to with mescal.

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= = Rough Draft =

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Children, as might be expected, are highly susceptible to propaganda. They are ignorant of the world and its ways, and therefore completely unsuspecting. ...Their little brothers and sisters have now become radio fodder and television fodder. in my childhood we were taught to sing nursery rhymes and, in pious households, hymns. Today the little ones warble the Singing Commercials.” =====

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This is from Huxley’s addition to Brave New World, Brave New World Revisited (p283). Today, more than ever, advertising is in your face. It is fed to us via radio, television, professional sports, on billboards, on cars, and on the internet. Most disturbing is the fact that children are being birthed into consumers at a younger and younger age. Before television and radio, advertisements were only written, and thus marketing could only be targeted to at youngest literate children. However with the invention of television and radio, children only need to have a basic grasp on language for the marketing to be instilled, almost brainwashed into them. ““Children...are living, talking records of what we tell them every day.” And in due course these living, talking records of television commercials will grow up, earn money and buy the products of industry”(284). Even my own mother told me but a few years back, that when I was only two years old, her and I were in the supermarket. She went to pick up Tide detergent, and I said, “Don’t buy that one mom. “Don’t risk it, Wisk it!”” Even at two years old the brainwashing had set in. =====

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This problem is only worsening because children are now being thrown in front of the t.v. at a younger and younger age, with the invention of children’s programming and so called “learning” t.v. shows. Children are repeating things that bear a semblance to “Ending is better than mending; The more stitches the less riches; One cubic centimeter cures ten gloomy sentiments; a gramme is better than a damn” (55,60,61). Susan Strasser claims in Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century, claims that “During the Great Depression and New Deal consumption, citizenship, and democracy came to light in an urgent way.” Strasser claims that as a result of the New Deal, “...American people fitfully but firmly came to equate the consumer with the citizen a consumer standard of living with democracy, and the full participation in such an economy of spending and accumulation with being an American.” =====

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This is exactly parallel with how citizens in the World State consider consumption to be an integral part of being a member of society, and thus an integral part of stability. Chapter two of BNW mentions the world state taking measures to increase consumption of goods. This can be seen as analogous to our society today, with the stimulus package: the goal of which is to spark spending among Americans. Spending, not saving. “Ending is better than Mending.” We live in a consumerist society where it is seen as better, and often times cheaper to throw something away than to fix it. =====

Food for thought:



=Draft 1:= <span style="display: block; font: 12px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px; text-align: center;">A Hypnopaedic Youth “Today, thanks to radio and television, [the propagandist] is in the happy position of being able to communicate even with unschooled adults and not yet literate children. Children, as might be expected, are highly susceptible to propaganda. They are ignorant of the world and its ways, and therefore completely unsuspecting. ...Their little brothers and sisters have now become radio fodder and television fodder. in my childhood we were taught to sing nursery rhymes and, in pious households, hymns. Today the little ones warble the Singing Commercials.” This is from Huxley’s addition to //Brave New World, Brave New World Revisited// (p283). Today, more than ever, advertising is in your face. It is fed to us via radio, television, professional sports, on billboards, on cars, and on the internet. Most disturbing is the fact that children are being birthed into consumers at a younger and younger age. Before television and radio, advertisements were only written, and thus marketing could only be targeted to at youngest literate children. However with the invention of television and radio, children only need to have a basic grasp on language for the marketing to be instilled, almost brainwashed into them. ““Children...are living, talking records of what we tell them every day.” And in due course these living, talking records of television commercials will grow up, earn money and buy the products of industry”(284). This writer’s mother told him but a few years back, that when he was only two years old, she took him to the supermarket. She went to pick up Tide detergent, and he said with delight, “Don’t buy that one mom. “Don’t risk it, Wisk it!”” Even at two years old the brainwashing had set in. This problem is only worsening because children are now being thrown in front of the television set at a younger age, with the invention of children’s programming and so called “learning” television shows. Children are repeating slogans that bear a semblance to “Ending is better than mending; The more stitches the less riches; One cubic centimeter cures ten gloomy sentiments; a gramme is better than a damn” (55,60,61). Susan Strasser claims in //Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century//, claims that “During the Great Depression and New Deal consumption, citizenship, and democracy came to light in an urgent way.” Strasser claims that as a result of the New Deal, “...American people fitfully but firmly came to equate the consumer with the citizen a consumer standard of living with democracy, and the full participation in such an economy of spending and accumulation with being an American.” This is exactly parallel with how citizens in the World State consider consumption to be an integral part of being a member of society, and thus an integral part of stability. Chapter two of BNW mentions the world state taking measures to increase consumption of goods. This can be seen as analogous to our society today, with the stimulus package: the goal of which is to spark spending among Americans. Spending, not saving. “Ending is better than Mending.” We live in a consumerist society where it is seen as better, and often times cheaper to throw something away than to fix it. Bring in //BNW Revisited// and where he talks about how “propagandists” use slogans and songs with absolutely no academic content. He mentions the power of song on page 283, “For the commercial propagandist, as for his colleagues in the fields of politics and religion, music possesses yet another advantage. Nonsense which it would be shameful for a reasonable being to write, speak or hear spoken can be sung or listened to by that same rational being with pleasure and even with a kind of intellectual conviction.” Advertising transcends logic and rationality, much in the way hypnopaedia does. On page 33 in //BNW// the director mentions how hypnopaedia cannot be “made an instument of intellectual education...” The director goes on to state "Whereas, if they'd only started on //moral// education," said the Director, leading the way towards the door. The students followed him, desperately scribbling as they walked and all the way up in the lift. "Moral education, which ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational”(34). Where am I going here... Fordism. What is it?  “Fordism is a term coined by Antonio Gramsci and used by critical analysts to designate a specifically 20th century corporate regime of mechanized production coupled with the mass consumption of standardized products. In turn, expanding production demanded expanded consumption, which required higher incomes. Hence, the symbolic significance of Ford's famous offer of $5 a day to workers”(([|__http://legacy.lclark.edu/~soan221/fordism2.html__]). Fordism is very key to //Brave New World//, it not only standardized goods, but turning the factory workers producing the goods into consumers of the goods by paying them slightly higher salaries. Henry Ford speaks about making a decent income and owning a car to enables people to enjoy “the blessings of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.” Ford is relating consumption and the ability to consume with happiness and pleasure. This is exactly synonymous with //Brave New World//, not only are all of the goods standardized, but the people as well. And “Everybody’s happy nowadays”(BNW 90). Another interesting note: on page 90 Bernard talks about yearning to be free, wondering, “-what would it be like if I could, if I were free--not enslaved by my conditioning.” This combined with Huxley’s ideas in //BNW Revisited// really illustrate how he believes that we are being conditioned by advertising and marketing, and thusly enslaved by them into being drones, drones of a consumerist society urged to buy, buy, buy.

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=Notes on the Assembly Line...On it not being invented by Henry Ford. This is an excerpt from Adam Smith's (he is the father of microeconomics) //A Wealth of Nations// from 1776... This is called, by Smith and other economists, the division and specialization of Labor= To take an example, therefore,<span class="footnote" style="background-color: #fcf7cc; border: 1px solid #ccccab; font-size: 0.6em; padding-left: 2px; padding-right: 2px; position: relative; top: -4px;"> [|*19] from a very trifling manufacture; but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of the pin-maker; a workman not educated to this business (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade),<span class="footnote" style="background-color: #fcf7cc; border: 1px solid #ccccab; font-size: 0.6em; padding-left: 2px; padding-right: 2px; position: relative; top: -4px;"> [|*20]  nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion), could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them.<span class="footnote" style="background-color: #fcf7cc; border: 1px solid #ccccab; font-size: 0.6em; padding-left: 2px; padding-right: 2px; position: relative; top: -4px;"> [|*21] I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins of a middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that is, certainly, not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth part of what they are at present capable of performing, in consequence of a proper division and combination of their different operations.

<span style="display: block; font: 12px 'Times New Roman'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-align: center; text-indent: -36px;">Annotated Bibliography for Portfolio 3
===<span style="font: 12px 'Times New Roman'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px;">**Barber, Benjamin R. //Con$umed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole//. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2007. 3-339. Print.** ===

<span style="font: 12px 'Times New Roman'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px;">//Okay source, but has a nice index//
===<span style="font: 12px 'Times New Roman'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px;"> Barber’s new book takes a look at consumerism in modern times. It begins describing how consumers are “born” and goes to make postulates on resisting consumerism. This book seems very informative, unfortunately the lack of descriptive chapter titles, and short chapters make is hard to find useful information to my particular topic without reading the entire four hundred page book, which is not plausible given the time constraint. This would be a good source, were it better organized. ===

===<span style="font: 12px 'Times New Roman'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px;">**McNeal, James U. //Kids as Customers: a Handbook of Marketing to Children//. New York: Lexington, 1992. 3-250. Print.** === ===<span style="font: 12px 'Times New Roman'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px;">//Excellent source (definitely the best one). Wonderful indexing and chapter headings, along with chronological bullet-points of what each chapter is about.// === ===<span style="font: 12px 'Times New Roman'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px;"> McNeal’s work is a wonderful source. The fact that the chapters are short and broken up into sections which are also listed in the table of contents make this book a wonderful source as it is easy to find information relevant to my topic. It examines how children are not only treated as customers, but transformed into them. It also describes the three markets that children take place in as well as “targeting” children with advertisements. Lots of really relevant, well-organized information. ===

<span style="font: 12px 'Times New Roman'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px;">**Schor, Juliet. //Born to Buy//. New York: Scribner, 2004. 9-219. Print.**
===<span style="font: 12px 'Times New Roman'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px;">//Very Good Source. Nice indexing as well as well-organized table of contents with some relevant chapters.// === ===<span style="font: 12px 'Times New Roman'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px;"> This book takes a bit darker look at the effects of advertising to children. It proclaims “Habit Formation” Selling Kids on Junk Food, Drugs, and Violence,” as an example. It really seems to examine how marketing towards children “undermines” the health of kids. It continues to take a look at the debates that are going on about whether or not this type of marketing should be allowed to take place. And in concluding, Schor offers her opinion as to what can be done about the matter. ===

===<span style="font: 12px 'Times New Roman'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px;">**Strasser, Susan, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt. "Consumption and Citizenship in the United States, 1900-1940." //Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century//. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1998. 37-58. Print.** === ===<span style="font: 12px 'Times New Roman'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px;">//Pretty Good Source. Book is full of wonderful information, however only one chapter really relates to my thesis.// === ===<span style="font: 12px 'Times New Roman'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36px; text-indent: -36px;"> Chapter 2, “Consumption and Citizenship in the US,” contains good information that //may// relate to my topic, should I find enough room to incorporate the American as a consumer (this may be construed as straying from my idea of the child as the consumer. This chapter contains information about how after The Great Depression, came The New Deal, which led the American people to “equate the consumer with the citizen, a consumer standard of living with democracy, and the full participation in such an economy of spending and accumulation with being an American.” It may be useful to bring the more general relationship between consumerism and citizenship and relate that to Brave new World. ===

Draft 2
<span style="display: block; font: 12px/19px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px; text-align: center;">A Hypnopaedic Youth <span style="font: 12px/19px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;"> In Aldous Huxley’s prophetic //Brave New World,// the reader is immersed in a society, the World State, in which the citizens are viewed not as people, but as consumers. The World State is a society in which the goal of humans is not to find love and reproduce (as natural birth is strictly forbidden) but to consume goods in order to maintain economic stability. While the book may seem a bit far fetched in certain regards, our society is equating existence with consumption more and more. Susan Strasser claims in //Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century//, that “During the Great Depression and New Deal consumption, citizenship, and democracy came to light in an urgent way.” Strasser claims that as a result of the New Deal, “...American people fitfully but firmly came to equate the consumer with the citizen a consumer standard of living with democracy, and the full participation in such an economy of spending and accumulation with being an American.” (37) <span style="font: 12px/19px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;"> This is exactly parallel with how citizens in the World State consider consumption to be an integral part of being a member of society, and thus an integral part of stability. In chapter three of //Brave New World,// the director is quoted as saying, "strange to think that even in Our Ford's day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It's madness. Nowadays the Controllers won't approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games."(37) This can be seen as analogous to our society today, with the stimulus package: the goal of which is to spark consumption among Americans. Spending, not saving. “Ending is better than Mending.”(BNW 55) We live in a consumerist society where it is seen as better and, often times, cheaper to throw something away rather than to fix it.

<span style="font: 12px/19px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;"> According to Huxley, in //Brave New World Revisited,// “Today, thanks to radio and television, [the propagandist] is in the happy position of being able to communicate even with unschooled adults and not yet literate children. Children, as might be expected, are highly susceptible to propaganda. They are ignorant of the world and its ways, and therefore completely unsuspecting. ...Their little brothers and sisters have now become radio fodder and television fodder. in my childhood we were taught to sing nursery rhymes and, in pious households, hymns. Today the little ones warble the Singing Commercials.”(283). <span style="font: 12px/19px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;"> Today, more than ever, advertising is in your face. It is fed to us via radio, television, professional sports, billboards, on cars, and on the internet. Most disturbing is the fact that children are being molded into consumers at a younger and younger age. Before television and radio, advertisements were only written, and thus marketing could only be targeted to, at youngest, literate children. However, with the invention of television and radio, children only need to have a basic grasp of language for the marketing to be instilled, almost brainwashed into them. ““Children...are living, talking records of what we tell them every day.” And in due course these living, talking records of television commercials will grow up, earn money and buy the products of industry”(BNWR 284). Anecdotally this writer’s mother told him but a few years back, that when he was only two years old, she took him to the supermarket. She went to pick up Tide detergent, and he said with delight, “Don’t buy that one mom. “Don’t risk it, Wisk it!”” Even at two years old the brainwashing had set in. <span style="font: 12px/19px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;"> The problem seems to be worsening as children are now being thrown in front of the television set at a younger age, with the invention of children’s programming and so called “learning” television shows. Children are repeating slogans that bear a semblance to “Ending is better than mending; The more stitches the less riches; One cubic centimeter cures ten gloomy sentiments; a gramme is better than a damn” ( BNW 55,60,61). Huxley reasserts his beliefs that consumers are being brainwashed through musical advertisements on page 283 of //Brave New World Revisited//, “For the commercial propagandist, as for his colleagues in the fields of politics and religion, music possesses yet another advantage. Nonsense which it would be shameful for a reasonable being to write, speak or hear spoken can be sung or listened to by that same rational being with pleasure and even with a kind of intellectual conviction.” Huxley is postulating that advertising transcends logic and rationality, much in the way he claims hypnopaedia to in //Brave New World//. Hypnopaedia, in context to //Brave New World,// is sleep-teaching--a type of brainwashing in which moral lessons are played over and over again to all of the children of the World State while they sleep. On page 33 of //Brave New World//, the director explains how hypnopaedia cannot be “made an instrument of intellectual education...” The director further explains that hypnopaedia cannot be used to “teach” critical thinking and analysis. It can only be used to program individuals to be able to recite phrases, without knowing the intent or rationale behind them. For this reason, the director states that hypnopaedia is a perfect vehicle for moral education, which in his words, “...ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational.”(34) This type of moral education yields individuals with moral beliefs which they will never question. Since the moral standard is set by the World State, hypnopaedia ensures the power and stability of the World State by allowing it to program its citizens to accept all information that the World State feeds them, and reject or question none of it. <span style="font: 12px/19px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;"> Fordism. What is it? <span style="font: 12px/19px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;"> “Fordism is a term coined by Antonio Gramsci and used by critical analysts to designate a specifically 20th century corporate regime of mechanized production coupled with the mass consumption of standardized products. In turn, expanding production demanded expanded consumption, which required higher incomes. Hence, the symbolic significance of Ford's famous offer of $5 a day to workers”(([|____http://legacy.lclark.edu/~soan221/fordism2.html____]). Fordism is very key to //Brave New World//, it not only standardized goods, but turning the factory workers producing the goods into consumers of the goods by paying them slightly higher salaries. Henry Ford speaks about making a decent income and owning a car to enables people to enjoy “the blessings of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.” Ford is relating consumption and the ability to consume with happiness and pleasure. This is exactly synonymous with //Brave New World//, not only are all of the goods standardized, but the people as well. And “Everybody’s happy nowadays”(BNW 90). <span style="font: 12px/19px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;"> Another interesting note: on page 90 Bernard talks about yearning to be free, wondering, “-what would it be like if I could, if I were free--not enslaved by my conditioning.” This combined with Huxley’s ideas in //BNW Revisited// really illustrate how he believes that we are being conditioned by advertising and marketing, and thusly enslaved by them into being drones, drones of a consumerist society urged to buy, buy, buy.

=Draft 3=

<span style="display: block; font: 12px/19px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px; text-align: center;">A Hypnopaedic Youth <span style="font: 12px/19px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;"> In Aldous Huxley’s prophetic //Brave New World,// the reader is immersed in a society, the World State, in which the citizens are viewed not as people, but as consumers. The World State is a society in which the goal of humans is not to find love and reproduce (as natural birth is strictly forbidden) but to consume goods in order to maintain economic stability. While the book may seem a bit far fetched in certain regards, our society is equating existence with consumption more and more. Susan Strasser claims in //Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century//, that “During the Great Depression and New Deal consumption, citizenship, and democracy came to light in an urgent way.” Strasser claims that as a result of the New Deal, “...American people fitfully but firmly came to equate the consumer with the citizen a consumer standard of living with democracy, and the full participation in such an economy of spending and accumulation with being an American.” (37) <span style="font: 12px/19px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;"> This is exactly parallel with how citizens in the World State consider consumption to be an integral part of being a member of society, and thus an integral part of stability. In chapter three of //Brave New World,// the director is quoted as saying, "strange to think that even in Our Ford's day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It's madness. Nowadays the Controllers won't approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games."(37) This can be seen as analogous to our society today, with the stimulus package: the goal of which is to spark consumption among Americans. Spending, not saving. “Ending is better than Mending.”(BNW 55) We live in a consumerist society where it is seen as better and, often times, cheaper to throw something away rather than to fix it.

<span style="font: 12px/19px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;"> According to Huxley, in //Brave New World Revisited,// “Today, thanks to radio and television, [the propagandist] is in the happy position of being able to communicate even with unschooled adults and not yet literate children. Children, as might be expected, are highly susceptible to propaganda. They are ignorant of the world and its ways, and therefore completely unsuspecting. ...Their little brothers and sisters have now become radio fodder and television fodder. in my childhood we were taught to sing nursery rhymes and, in pious households, hymns. Today the little ones warble the Singing Commercials.”(283). <span style="font: 12px/19px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;"> Today, more than ever, advertising is in your face. It is fed to us via radio, television, professional sports, billboards, on cars, and on the internet. Most disturbing is the fact that children are being molded into consumers at a younger and younger age. Before television and radio, advertisements were only written, and thus marketing could only be targeted to, at youngest, literate children. However, with the invention of television and radio, children only need to have a basic grasp of language for the marketing to be instilled, almost brainwashed into them. Huxley quotes a star of a television show aimed towards children on page 284 of //Brave New World Revisited// as stating, “Children...are living, talking records of what we tell them every day.” Huley adds to this by stating, “And in due course these living, talking records of television commercials will grow up, earn money and buy the products of industry”(BNWR 284). Anecdotally this writer’s mother told him but a few years back, that when he was only two years old, she took him to the supermarket. She went to pick up Tide detergent, and he said with delight, “Don’t buy that one mom. “Don’t risk it, Wisk it!”” Even at two years old the brainwashing had set in. <span style="font: 12px/19px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;"> The problem seems to be worsening as children are now being thrown in front of the television set at a younger age, with the invention of children’s programming and so called “learning” television shows. Children are repeating slogans that bear a semblance to “Ending is better than mending; The more stitches the less riches; One cubic centimeter cures ten gloomy sentiments; a gramme is better than a damn” ( BNW 55,60,61). Huxley reasserts his beliefs that consumers are being brainwashed through musical advertisements on page 283 of //Brave New World Revisited//, “For the commercial propagandist, as for his colleagues in the fields of politics and religion, music possesses yet another advantage. Nonsense which it would be shameful for a reasonable being to write, speak or hear spoken can be sung or listened to by that same rational being with pleasure and even with a kind of intellectual conviction.” Huxley is postulating that advertising transcends logic and rationality, much in the way he claims hypnopaedia to in //Brave New World//. <span style="font: 12px/19px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;"> Hypnopaedia, in context to //Brave New World,// is sleep-teaching--a type of brainwashing in which moral lessons are played over and over again to all of the children of the World State while they sleep. On page 33 of //Brave New World//, the director explains how hypnopaedia cannot be “made an instrument of intellectual education...” The director further explains that hypnopaedia cannot be used to “teach” critical thinking and analysis. It can only be used to program individuals to be able to recite phrases, without knowing the intent or rationale behind them. For this reason, the director states that hypnopaedia is a perfect vehicle for moral education, which in his words, “...ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational.”(34) This type of moral education yields individuals with moral beliefs which they will never question. Since the moral standard is set by the World State, hypnopaedia ensures the power and stability of the World State by allowing it to program its citizens to accept all information that the World State feeds them, and reject or question none of it.

<span style="font: 12px/19px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;"> But can the use of song in advertisements, particularly advertisements aimed towards children, be viewed as a type of brainwashing? The power of song is not to be overlooked. Song is most certainly a wonderful vehicle of learning. As a matter of fact, it generally is the very first way in which children are formally taught in school. Children are not simply told to memorize their ABC’s, but are taught a song which facilitates the memorization. Everyone remembers singing, “Now I know my A-B-C’s! Next time won’t you sing with me?” as a child. The common use of the phrase “having a bad song stuck in one’s head,” suggests somewhat more that a catchy song can become “stuck”, or somewhat brainwashed into one’s head. It seems almost horrifying to realize that our society allows advertisers to almost force children into consumerism. Are children even really given a choice as to weather or not to be materialistic consumers? <span style="font: 12px/19px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;"> Are we //really// being conditioned to buy, buy, buy as impressionable youths? James McNeal’s book, //Kids as Customers// certainly supports that we are. The subheading of the book on the title page is the following, “A Handbook of Marketing to Children.” The book states that roughly $1,003,500,000.00 was spent in its year of publication (1992). (p133). McNeal’s model on the effects of advertising on children “suggests that an ad campaign (rarely one ad) produces attitudes and behaviors among an audience of children. The attitudes are toward the product, the brand, its producer, seller, even the advertisement and advertising in general.” He explains that this behavior that advertising produces in children is manifested in three ways: children seeking out an buying the product; attempting to get their parents to either buy it for them or give them money to buy it; and peers pressuring the child into thinking he //needs// the product. (146). Huxley certainly views conditioning of this sort as a type of enslavement. Evidence of this can be seen by combing his insight from //Brave New World Revisited// above along with Bernard’s quote on page 90 of //Brave New World//, “-what would it be like if I could, if I were free--not enslaved by my conditioning.”

<span style="font: 12px/19px 'Bookman Old Style'; letter-spacing: 0px; margin: 0px;"> The next question is: is this ethical? It all seems terrifyingly evil our children are being enslaved into consumerism, all to benefit the profit margins of firms. But is this really a bad thing? Huxley provides us with a possible society should all of this advertising “brainwashing” be taken to an extreme. But let’s take a look at the other extreme. Suppose that children were not enslaved into consumerism, but rather conditioned to be frugal. Simple macroeconomic theory teaches us that saving, while seemingly good for the individual, is actually very detrimental to society as a whole. With citizens saving their money, and fixing their old and broken goods, firms would produce less of these goods. Less production obviously means the firms would need less labor. The result would be unemployment. While this would be all good and fine in a society of subsistence farmers, it would lead to catastrophe in a society such as ours. Unemployment would soar, and more and more families would be forced to go without food, shelter, and clothing. The families in this new, hypothetical, shall we call it “New Brave New World” would also be enslaved, enslaved to poverty and all of its atrocities. Perhaps we are enslaved into being consumers. But it is our consumerist tendencies that enables technological advance, and ultimately the betterment of society.